11 March – 10 June 2025
theDock Centre for Social Impact
300-722 Cormorant St, Victoria, BC
M-F 8:30am-5:00pm
About the Artist and Work:
GENTE EL ARBOL
(Latin for the tree people )
I am lens based artist situated on Vancouver island that shoots both film and digital still imagery. I mostly focus on working in the black and white medium, primarily on long term projects. I believe that the camera is a tool to help myself navigate through this world and all the trials and tribulations one sees as a human being living among other human beings.
From April 2020 until February 2023, I photographed an area in Victoria, British Columbia known as as Pandora Street. It is a rough area with a vast variety of individuals that are going through rough times and are often overlooked.
For three years, I relentlessly documented, with consent, the lives of others and the trials and tribulations that some end up in this life cycle, and in doing so heard and saw things that I could not un-see, or un-here.
Lost photographs, drawings, memories, birthday and Christmas cards on the ground, all of these things have stuck with me up until this very day.
At the very end of the project I started going for long walks in secluded areas with no people, just nature, and unknowingly started photographing trees that looked and reminded me of people that I had photographed on Pandora Street
From smiling and laughing, to living and loving and crying and dying, and downing, I still could not escape what I had seen or heard, so I dealt with it the only way I know how to.
Get out and make some photographs.
The series name derives from my multi-ethnic background of Mexican and Ukrainian on my mother and father’s side respectively .
The way the light during certain seasons refracts off the foliage and branches, never ceases to amaze me. It brings an ambience to the tree that is indescribable in words but a photograph can capture.
There is light in darkness and if done in a certain way, can pertain to a certain beauty that is often overlooked
I have tried to capture this the best that I can to hopefully resonate with others the way it has resonated with me.
